Just a short post this week, since I’m sure we all want to get back to our holiday celebrations.
And speaking of which, I’m sure that everyone who remembers The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe as well as I do knows where today’s title comes from. The first time that Lucy finds herself in in Narnia, she meets Tumnus the faun, who tells her that because of the power of the White Queen, in Narnia it’s always winter, but never Christmas.
At this point there have been scads of manuals with monsters for Dungeons & Dragons, going all the way back to the ’70s and that little booklet titled Monsters and Treasure. But last month a new kind of Monster Manual for 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons crept onto the scene, and it’s different from any official D&D monster book that I’ve ever held.
You don’t often see the word “innovative” anywhere close to the word “monster” but I think I might just have to try it: this is an innovative look at how to use monsters in a D&D game. And if 5e isn’t your thing, it could be of use in most retro-clones and related D&D-like games as well. It could help your local DM bring the game’s monsters to more terrifying life.
It’s not just about monsters as stat blocks. It even begins with a framing story, in that it’s purportedly a lore book from a scholar of the fantastic and bearer of unlikely names, Volothamp Geddarm. Some reviewers seem to have been disappointed that Volo’s own comments (as well of those of a dissenting scholar) are only peppered through the manual, having seemingly missed that a manual written entirely by a biased and unreliable narrator might render all its information questionable while in game.
The book is divided into six broad sections, and, unlike the 5e Monster Manual itself, is well-indexed. Not only is there an index of monster stat blocks, there’s a list of the lairs in the book, and Appendix C provides listings of creature by type, by challenge rating, and by environment. Hopefully somewhere online there’s an official listing of ALL 5e monsters listed by these categories, for the ones in this book cover only the creatures included within.
It’s Christmas. You’ve got everybody together. Perhaps you’ve all watched Stranger Things and now you have the urge to dust down your dice, dig out the Dungeon Masters’ Guide and introduce whatever kids just happen to be lying around to the imaginative world of your youth.
Or perhaps in a fit of nostalgia, you made a Christmas present to yourself of a recently published role-playing game, but the only available players right now are under 12. Or perhaps you’re like me, a life long player, and this is just a good moment to share the joy.
So how do you go about introducing kids to tabletop role-playing?
Really very easily, as it happens. The youngest child I’ve GM’d for was my 5-year-old-daughter when she crashed a party of 9-year olds, found all the traps and made off with the loot. Having done this a few times and talked to other gamer-parents, I’ve noticed a few things…
(Geek and Sundry beat me to the punch on this one (link), but my take is slightly different.)
The December 2016 Asimov’s Science Fiction is something of a landmark, in that it’s the last monthly issue of Asimov’s — a magazine that has been publishing continually for 39 years. It’s as close as we come to an institution in this field, and while change is sometimes scary, in this case I think it’s a good thing. Like its sister publication Analog, the magazine is moving to a bimonthly schedule. I always enjoy the big double issues, and getting six of them a year for each magazine is something to look forward to.
The last monthly issue has stories by Karl Bunker, Gay Partington Terry, Gregory Norman Bossert, James Sallis, Kali Wallace, and David Erik Nelson. Here’s Sheila’s full description:
Our blockbuster December 2016 novella, “Where There Is Nothing, There Is God” by David Erik Nelson, is a rollicking Time Portal tale. It’s filled with a cast of unsavory characters who operate as though Cotton Mather’s favorite TV show was Breaking Bad. In this vastly entertaining story, it’s hard to know whom to root for so just make sure your inertia dampening system is on and enjoy the ride!
Once you decompress from Colonial Massachusetts, be prepared for a sharp shift to Gregory Norman Bossert’s wild depiction of “HigherWorks” in a future London; an eerie discovery “On the Cold Side of the Island” has long-term effects on the lives of three teens in a new tale by Kali Wallace; James Sallis escorts us to another island where we learn “How the Damned Live On”; new to Asimov’s author Gay Partington Terry’s magical tale explains the significance of “Empty Shoes by the Lake”; and in Karl Bunker’s “They All Have One Breath” artists who want to create interesting work must strive against the banality of a “perfect” society controlled by artificial intelligence.
Robert Silverberg’s Reflections column examines what it means to be as “Dead as a Dodo” in this modern age; Peter Heck’s On Books reviews new works by Lois McMaster Bujold, Charles Stross, Tim Powers, Indra Das, Lavie Tidhar, and others; plus we’ll have an array of poetry and other features you’re sure to enjoy.
The cover art is by NASA. The guest editorial is by Sarah Pinsker.
The interior of the Nahon Synagogue, with lamps donated by local families
Both of my readers have probably been wondering where I’ve been the past few weeks. I just got back from one of my semi-regular writing retreats in Tangier, Morocco. Besides getting heaps of writing done, every time I go to Tangier I always discover something new in this historic and complex city. This time I found a beautiful synagogue hidden at the end of a tiny alley.
Nahon Synagogue was built in 1878 by a wealthy banker from the nearby city of Tetouan in honor of his father Mose Nahon. Or this might have happened in 1868. The plaque on the front of the building says 1868, the caretaker and the synagogue’s literature say 1878.
The history of Jews in Tangier stretches back way before the 19th century. Archaeologists have dug up potsherds decorated with menorahs dating from Carthaginian times. Nothing else is known about Tangier’s Jewish community for this early period.
Having finally posted reviews of all the movies I saw at the 2016 Fantasia International Film Festival, I want by way of conclusion to think about what I’ve learned. I don’t just mean about film, or about the film industry. But about genre, and what genre does, and how it works on film.
I will start, though, by saying that I feel I have learned a little bit more this year about the way the film industry works. For one thing, I’ve seen how quickly the business moves; a number of works I’ve reviewed have already turned up on Netflix, Amazon, or a video-on-demand service. For another thing, I saw this year how important the length of a movie can be — I saw more films this year than last that pushed the two-hour mark, and if some of them justified that length, others perhaps did not. And: for whatever reason, this year I was struck by the scale of ambition it takes to make a film, in the sense of how many resources it takes and how many moving parts are involved. Even a relatively cheap movie will cost six figures; even a no-budget film probably has a budget, and that budget probably has at least five digits in it. I knew this, of course. But for whatever reason, what I heard in the question-and-answer sessions with the directors this year brought home how much making a movie involves project management; how many moving parts are involved in filmmaking, the sheer scale not just of a major production but even of a very small one.
Still: what really hit me this year was the way that film, and people in film, approached genre. Guillermo del Toro’s impassioned discussions of the importance of genre, horror, and monsters helped frame the festival for me. I found myself watching how a movie, how a story, approached the idea of genre. How it played with conventions, referred to other films, or tried to forge its own path. I think I do tend to focus on these things anyway, but at Fantasia this year the movies I saw seemed to come together to demonstrate something about the nature of genre and moviemaking.
The Goodman Games site is one of my regular stopping points on the web. The company’s well known as an imagination factory that produces some of the most innovative and entertaining game supplements in print today. It’s also home of the popular Dungeon Crawl Classics role-playing game.
What it’s never been until now is a purveyor of Weird Tales, so I was intrigued when I discovered five facsimile issues of the famous magazine were available for purchase on the site.
I wrote publisher Joseph Goodman and asked him what this availability signified. As I should have guessed, it involved Appendix N, Gary Gygax’s famed recommended reading list printed at the back of the original Dungeon Master’s Guide (from Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, if you’re not a gamer).
For those not in the know, that appendix launched a generation into the exploration of fantasy fiction, from Anderson to Zelazny. It was an immense influence on gamers and future writers alike and something Joseph Goodman has used as a touchstone for both the creation of adventures and the design of the Dungeon Crawl Classics game itself. Here’s what he had to say.
After saying a few words about Laura Anne Gilman’s upcoming novel The Cold Eye — in which the devil runs a saloon on the American frontier, and sends a sixteen year old girl out to fight monsters for him — it got me hankering to seek out more weird westerns.
I didn’t have to look far. Tor Books and Pinnacle Entertainment (creator of the Deadlands RPG) have a promising weird western series on the go, set in the undead-haunted frontier of Deadlands. The latest installment, Thunder Moon Rising, was released in trade paperback in September. It was written by Jeffrey Mariotte, author of the horror novels River Runs Red and Cold Black Hearts.
Fear is abroad in the Deadlands as a string of brutal killings and cattle mutilations trouble a Western frontier town in the Arizona Territory, nestled in the forbidding shadow of the rugged Thunder Mountains. A mule train is massacred, homes and ranches are attacked, and men and women are stalked and butchered by bestial killers who seem to be neither human nor animal, meanwhile a ruthless land baron tries to buy up all the surrounding territory-and possibly bring about an apocalypse.
Once an officer in the Union Army, Tucker Bringloe is now a worthless drunk begging for free drinks at the corner saloon. When he’s roped into a posse searching for the nameless killers, Tuck must rediscover the man he once was if he’s to halt the bloodshed and stop occult forces from unleashing Hell on Earth… when the Thunder Moon rises.
We covered the previous volume in the series, Jonathan Maberry’s Ghostwalkers, last year.
Deadlands: Thunder Moon Rising was published by Tor Books on September 20, 2016. It is 397 pages, priced at $15.99 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital version.
Wednesday, August 3, was the last day of the Fantasia International Film Festival. Three full weeks of genre films would wrap up here, and I was looking forward to the three last films of the year. The day would begin with the Chinese martial-arts film Judge Archer (Jianshi liu baiyuan). After that came the independent American movie If There’s a Hell Below, promising a paranoid thriller about whistleblowers and government surveillance. Finally came a movie I’d been eagerly anticipating since the start of the festival, the Polish science-fictional classic from 1977 On the Silver Globe (Na srebrnym globie), a space opera about colonization and war on an alien planet. All three were rewarding, and all three were pleasantly (and increasingly) elliptical.
Judge Archer was written and directed by Xu Haofeng. Set in 1917 in a China divided among rival armies, it follows a man (Yang Song) who becomes a supremely skillful archer and uses those skills to judge disputes between martial arts schools. When one of those warlords kills the father of a beautiful woman (Yenny Martin), she asks the man — who has taken the cursed name Judge Archer from his master — to bring him to justice. But the warlord has a beautiful wife (Li Chengyuan), who is tempting the judge to abandon his beliefs. Betrayals and duels follow as the story finally, inevitably, works itself out in a semi-mystical duel.
Xu’s background is worth describing here. A long-time student of martial arts, he wrote a bestselling memoir of one of his masters in 2006, The Bygone Kung Fu World (Shiqu de wulin), then followed with another bestselling book in 2006, Dao Shi Xiao Shan (a title translated as alternately Monk Comes Down the Mountain or A Taoist Monk Plunging Into the Madding Crowd). His books have been characterised as less fantastical than most wuxia tales, with a fascination for cultural elements such as painting and calligraphy, as well as an abiding sense of the loss of a traditional kung fu culture. He directed his first movie, The Sword Identity (Wo kou de zong ji), in 2011. Judge Archer was completed in 2012, but not released until this year; in the interim Xu wrote the script for Wong Kar-wai’s The Grandmaster (Yi dai zong shi), then wrote and directed another film, The Final Master (Shi fu). His films tend to shun spectacular wire work in favour of more realistic and intense martial arts duels, often evoking a sense of the importance of kung fu traditions and the passing of those traditions in the modern world.
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I love weird westerns. But the sub-genre has fallen on hardsrcabble times recently, which means you have to be something of a risk-taker to write one. And to launch a series? You’d need to be a daredevil.
Laura Anne Gilman is a daredevil, and she proved it earlier this year with the first novel in her new weird western series, Silver on the Road. In his NPR review, Jason Sheehan said:
[Gilman has] chosen a fertile place to begin her new series (the broad plains, red rock and looming mountains of the American West), and amped up the oddity of it all by planting the Devil there as a card dealer, fancy-pants and owner of a saloon in a town called Flood.
And the Devil, he runs the Territory. Owns it in a way. Wards it against things meaner than he is, because Gilman’s Devil isn’t exactly the church-y version. He’s dapper in a fine suit and starched shirt. He’s power incarnate — a man (no horns, no forked tail, just a hint of brimstone now and then) who gets things done…
Lost in the middle of the story, you’ll feel somehow that you’ve always known the Devil wore a suit and ran a gambling house back in six-gun times, that he once sent a sixteen year old girl out into the world to fight monsters for him.
Silver on the Road became a Locus hardcover bestseller, and a Publishers Weekly Top Ten Pick for Fall 2015 in their SF, Fantasy, & Horror category. The second novel, The Cold Eye, arrives in hardcover next month from Saga Press. Here’s the description.